I served as a United Nations peacekeeper in Visoko, Bosnia from October, 1993 to April, 1994. My job was in administration, but as anyone in the military will tell you, you are a soldier first and a tradesman second. For me, that meant army stuff came before the paperwork so if they needed extra hands to man the sentry bunkers that surrounded our camp, for example, I could be pulled from my job for guard duty.
One evening, in March, 1994, I was assigned to the bunker called Op Delta. It was a wooden hut with just enough room for two people and usually contained a radio, water, some food, a seat and a small metal garbage can. To give us a good view of the surrounding area, it sat on top of a sea container and looked similar to this one:
The guard duty assignment came to me with only a few minutes notice, so I had to leave work, inhale dinner, grab my rifle, helmet and flak vest and get out to the bunker to start my four to midnight shift. Inside Delta, I met Corporal Massicotte, a young French reservist from Trois-Rivières.
One of our jobs, besides maintaining the security of our camp, was to report so-called ceasefire violations. That included any small arms, mortar or artillery fire that we could see from our perch. As Massicotte gave me a briefing on reporting these violations, I developed a serious case of the hiccups.
Now, when I usually got the hiccups, it wasn’t just a little “hic” that I could swallow quitely. My hiccups were a combination of a high-pitched regular hiccup and a burp. They were loud, impossible to hide and erupted every fifteen seconds or so. And they would go on forever.
I blamed the quick dinner.
It didn’t take long for Massicotte to become annoyed. He insisted that we try remedies that I knew would never work. I drank water three different ways, held my breath till I was a shade darker than my helmet and even tried jumping jacks. I drew the line at standing on my head. As expected, nothing worked.
Then a distant rumble interrupted our hiccup-curing experiments. I picked up the binoculars and scanned the horizon just as a pillar of dust and debris rose up behind a house about two kilometres away. Massicotte reported the ceasefire violation on the radio and I watched for more, working to steady the binoculars against my incessant hiccups.
Another mortar struck a road about a kilometre away. I kept the binoculars tight to my face, watching the area. People ran inside, cars drove away. The neighbourhood became very quiet. Then a third and fourth mortar exploded on the road. A fifth and sixth followed in quick succession, each one coming closer to the camp. Massicotte made his report.
I leaned forward and propped my elbows on the ledge, trying to keep the binoculars level as I scanned the road and houses looking for the next impact. The only sounds were Massicotte’s words and my hiccups. When he finished his report, I didn’t hear him step back from the radio where he waited for my next hiccup then plowed his combat boot into the small steel garbage can.
I haven’t had the hiccups since.
🙂